American Apparel has done it again, and while they're probably doing an ironic top rock at their continued ability to rile the Man, we think it's time for an intervention. So here we go, kids: our suggested AA 12-step program:

Ho hum, the UK Advertising Standards Authority has banned an American Apparel ad that ran in Vice…
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1. Admit, ye higher-ups who run American Apparel, that you are powerless over Apparel: that your attempt to become ever-more-ironic and stay ahead of the aesthetic standards of The Man has become unmanageable and unwearable and that your immature antics are serving to undermine and overshadow genuinely progressive labor practices - thereby doing a disservice to your avowed mission. (Also, that your clothes fall apart and you've discontinued like half of the tee shirts in favor of rubberized leggings.)

We've spilled a lot of virtual ink on American Apparel. We've talked about its possibly…
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2. Come to believe that a Power greater than yourselves could restore you to sanity: to wit, employees who are less interested in sucking up to an arrested adolescent than in propagating the company's more laudable aims; who recognize that your aesthetic jumped the shark three years ago; and that gold spandex is not the outward manifestation of a liberated consciousness.

8. Make a list of all persons you, American Apparel, have harmed, and become willing to make amends to them all. This will take a long time, but let's start with any employee fired based on her looks, all models who've been placed in compromising positions, everyone who had to look at that gross billboard on Houston, Woody Allen, teenagers who now think seersucker bloomers are acceptable eveningwear, those of us who have been wearing big glasses for years, those forced to sympathize with Woody Allen in nebbish-weight cage match, employees who were sexually harassed, employees forced to hang out at the company apartment, lawyers the company slandered, hipsters whose style you commercialized, and every 1980s Bar Mitzvah who you mocked in the service of tired irony.

Woody Allen's lawsuit against American Apparel, which used his picture on billboards in New…
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9. Make direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others or involve their wearing said terrycloth underpants.

10. Continue to take personal inventory and when you, AA, are wrong promptly admit it. Not just by taking down certain billboards of a woman in tights and no pants apparently being frisked, or throwing money at recurring sexual harassment charges, or claiming philanthropy and support of immigration reform make it okay to do whatever the hell you want the rest of the time.

11. Seek through prayer and meditation (okay, that's negotiable) to improve your conscious contact with actual women and reasonable people as we understand them, asking only for knowledge of their wishes in wearable clothing, in respectful work conditions, and the power to carry that out. "Legal means" will work, too.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we hope you, American Apparel, will try to carry this message to all customers, employees, teenagers, models, and to practice these principles in all your affairs.